The wet, wet Autumn social media roundup

When’s it’s cold and wet outside it’s perfect for sitting down and finding some fans on social media, so huddle up and enjoy the best of the social media news in the last month or so. Do let me know if you’ve seen anything else interesting.

Google+ and authorship for the hardcore

Generally, Google+ is still only used by online marketers and people who work at Google. But we know there is real value in seriously considering your Google+ efforts, and there are some companies doing some great stuff on it. For those who want to optimise their content and get the maximum SEO value this SEOmoz post is a winner. That post moves us nicely onto authorship markup – social media is effectively about person-to-person communication and branding, and authorship is a big part of this. The linked post is a few months old but still very relevant, and once you’re comfortable with the principles you can read about why it’s important to ensure you have a nice photo!

Pinterest stats and shizzle

In case you haven’t heard the news yet, data has shown that Pinterest is good for targeting 35+ women who are quite likely to buy hipster furniture. OK, I may be paraphrasing somewhat, but generally Pinterest is attracting brands because Pinners don’t mind following them and buying their pretentious junk / valuable and stylish wares. And if you haven’t had enough of a Pinterest hit, try these 12 Pinterest tools, of which I think Pinstamatic.com is probably the coolest one that I’ve seen in a little while. Not most useful for marketers, but fairly cool.

look, like and buy Facebook

Here’s a collection of tips from some people you may have heard of and most you won’t. They generally boil down to ‘be interesting‘, so I’m going to summarise it as such. Interestingly some recent research indicated that almost 20% of new Facebook likes come from mobile, up from 5% earlier in the year. It’s a good indicator of the booming popularity of mobile browsing. We know from previous roundups that Facebook commerce (F-commerce) has basically bombed, as nobody really buys through the platform. However they are still plugging away trying to fix that, with the latest effort being the ability to ‘collect’, ‘want’, or click a link through to buy products in imagesposted by selected brands. It’s a Pinterest-style approach, but will it buck the trend for a lack of bucks spent on Facebook? Ooh, feel the power of the pun in that last sentence…magical.

The number of shares of this URL (this includes copy/pasting a link back to Facebook)

The number of likes and comments on stories on Facebook about this URL

The number of inbox messages containing this URL as an attachment.

Marketing Land show that it does indeed include messages, comments, chat, and more. Not a breach of privacy, but sneaky nonetheless and only reduces the trust we can put in their privacy assertions!

questionable adverts

Well Facebook Questions didn’t last long. In trying to compete with the awesome Quora they, somewhat unsurprisingly, were given a big ol’ bitch slap and sent packing. Facebook are now ‘focusing their efforts elsewhere‘ apparently. Good choice – quit while you’re so far behind nobody will even notice. There have also been some sightings of non-social ads creeping into the Facebook timeline – a place usually reserved for social recommendation ads and apps. It’s been widely reported that Facebook are struggling to make as much money from ads these days what with the increase in mobile traffic, so it’s a move that has been predicted by some. We’ll see how it develops…

social ads and YouTube analytics

The headline says it all really. Firstly YouTube: have a load of embedded YouTube videos in your site and want to track what actually happens with them? See this script from Lunametrics. I love little script hacks like this that take a bit of the developer hassle out of Analytics tracking, so is a must if you’re embedding YouTube vids all over your site. Secondly, if you’re advertising on the big guys of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn but aren’t sure how they display their performance stats, check out this nice postthat summarises how the big three work.

Twitter finds girls

You can now target your promoted tweet/products by gender as well as geographic, interest and device. It’s quite clever because nowhere do you actually tell Twitter your gender; they work it out through a range of signals. What happens if you’re a man named Alex who wears a kilt? Mixed signals?

In other Twitter news, Twitter have launched a directoryof all its user accounts to help make search engine spidering of profiles a little bit easier. It also seems as though Twitter is investing in it’s video capabilities with the recent acquisition of clip service Vine, perhaps to bring its video hosting in-house. So in the future it will be easier to see videos of kilts or skirts. Each to their own…

LinkedIn tarts up

Doing a mid-life-crisis in mid-October, LinkedIn did the equivalent of putting on some makeup and buying a sports car with its redesign. Shades of grey prevail (no, not like 50 Shades – the site is better written than that) and it encourages easier editing, recommending and connecting with others. One thing you’ll want to make sure you update are the new business pages – Portent have done a fairly good explanation of what to optimise and how to usethem.

Stumbled upon a list. Fell over.

More Pinterest-copying developments, this time on excellent random-content-highlighter StumbleUpon. They’ve been working on a number of site improvements, of which a biggie is the ability to create ‘lists’ of themed webpages – there are 45,000 alreadyaccording to MarketingLand. Any excuse to revisit StumbleUpon…last time I spent ages tumbling a pyramid of teddy bears. No real reason; it just seemed proper.